EVGA e-GeForce 7950 GX2

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Introduction

When we first took a look at the Gigabyte GA-SN-SLI Quad Royal motherboard a few months back, we gave it solid praise, yet lamented on what we thought was an exciting opportunity. The board was capable of supporting up to four individual PCI-e based graphic cards, but the Quad Royal was only able to support two GeForce cards running in an SLI configuration. Around the same time we posted that review, however, NVIDIA was promoting Quad SLI in pre-configured systems through a handful of resellers - typically for a premium. NVIDIA remained mum on the prospect of a DYI Quad SLI setup for a time, while in the labs they better prepared the hardware and drivers.

From this testing was born the GeForce 7900 GX2, and subsequently the readily available GeForce 7950 GX2. While both cards essentially used the same GPU, the 7950 GX2 board was smaller, sleeker, and worked on a broader number of chipsets. This came about through the use of a custom PCI Express switch that adhered to the PCI Express standard. EVGA has provided us their own GeForce 7950 GX2, and we've got one in the lab for testing, so let's get down to comparing this behemoth to the current stable of GeForce cards.

Next-Generation Texture Engine
Accelerated texture access
Up to 16 textures per rendering pass
Support for 16-bit floating point format and 32-bit floating point format
Support for non-power of two textures
Support for sRGB texture format for gamma textures
DirectX and S3TC texture compression

64-Bit Texture Filtering and Blending
._Delivers true high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting support
._Full floating point support throughout entire pipeline
._Floating point filtering improves the quality of images in motion
._Floating point texturing drives new levels of clarity and image detail
._Floating point frame buffer blending gives detail to special effects like motion blur and explosions

One typically expects higher prices for a card with the expected performance of the 7950 GX2, never mind buying two of them for a Quad SLI setup. As such, it would be nice to get a little something extra in the package. EVGA does their best to mitigate the situation by including the essentials: a component-out cable, an S-Video cable, two DVI-to-VGA adapters, and a PCI-Express power splitter. Of course, installation guides and CD-ROMs were included, although the latest drivers from NVIDIA were needed to test some of the cards in our testing suite. A last throw-in was an activation code for Half-Life 2: Episode One. One still needs to download the game over Steam, but we appreciate the ability to try out a newer game to show off all of this hardware.